The Russia House (34 page)

‘A wise lawyer, a fine officer,’ Russell Sheriton advised me next morning in a reverential murmur, knowing I was neither, as his strong, soft palms enveloped my hand. ‘One of the true greats. Harry, how are you doing?’

Little had changed in him since his tour of duty in London: the rings beneath the eyes a little doggier, a little sadder, the blue suit a size or two larger, the same white-shirted paunch. The same mortician’s aftershave, six years on, anointed the Agency’s newest head of Soviet operations.

A group of his young men stood respectfully apart from him, clutching their travel bags and looking like stranded passengers at an airport. Clive and Bob were mounted either side of him like cohorts. Bob looked older by ten years. A chastened smile had replaced his old-world self-assurance. He greeted us too effusively, as if he had been warned to stay away from us.

The Island Conference, as it euphemistically became known, was about to begin.

There is an underlying pleasantness to the events of the next days, an air of good men going about their business, which I am in danger of forgetting as I recall the rest.

It is the hardest point for me to make, yet I owe it to Barley to try, for he never took against our hosts – he never blamed them for anything that happened to him, then or later. He could grumble about Americans in general, but no sooner had he met them individually than he spoke of them as decent fellows all. There was not a man among them he wouldn’t have been happy to swap a drink with any evening at the local, if we’d had one. And of course Barley always saw the force of any argument that was directed against him, just as he was always vastly impressed by other people’s industry.

And my goodness, were they industrious! If numbers, money and sheer endeavour alone could have produced intelligence, the Agency would have had it by the cartload – except that, alas, the human head is not a cart, and there is such a thing as unintelligence as well.

And how deeply they yearned to be loved! – and Barley warmed immediately to their need. Even as they tore into him, they needed to be loved. And by Barley, too! Just as to this day they need to be loved for all their staged putsches, destabilisations and wild adventures against The Enemy Out There.

Yet it was this very mystery of good hearts turned inside out that gave our week its underlying terror.

Years ago I talked to a man who had been flogged, an English mercenary who was doing us a few favours in Africa and needed paying off. What he remembered most was not the lash but the orange juice they gave him afterwards. He remembers being helped back to his hut, he remembers being laid face down on the straw. But what he really remembers is the glass of fresh orange juice that a warder set at his head, then crouched beside him, waiting patiently, till he was strong enough to drink some. Yet it was this same warder who had flogged him.

We too had our glasses of orange juice. And we had our decent warders, even if they were disguised behind headsets and a surface animosity that quickly melted before Barley’s warmth. Within a day of our arrival, the same guards with whom we were forbidden to fraternise were tiptoeing at any odd moment in and out of Barley’s boat-house, stealing a Coke or a Scotch from him before slipping back to their posts. They sensed he was that kind of man. And as Americans they were fascinated by his celebrity.

There was one old hand called Edgar, an ex-Marine, who gave him quite a run for his money at chess. Barley, I learned later, got his name and address out of him, against every known canon of the trade, so that they could play a contest by post ‘when all this is over’.

Not only warders either. In Sheriton’s chorus of young men, as in Sheriton himself, there was a moderation that was like an even beat of sanity against the hysterical highs and lows of those whom Sheriton himself dubbed collectively the egomaniacs.

But that, I suppose, is the tragedy of great nations. So much talent bursting to be used, so much goodness longing to come out. Yet all so miserably spoken for, that sometimes we could scarcely believe it was America speaking to us at all.

But it was. The lash was real.

The interrogations took place in the billiards room. The wooden floor had been painted dark red for dancing and the billiards table replaced by a ring of chairs. But an ivory scorer and a row of initialled cue-cases still lined the wall, and the long downlight made a pool at the centre where Barley was obliged to sit. Ned fetched him from the boat-house.

‘Mr. Brown, sir, I am proud to shake your hand and I have just decided that my name for the duration of our relationship is Haggarty,’ Sheriton declared. ‘I took one look at you, I felt Irish. Don’t ask me why.’ He was leading Barley at a good pace across the room. ‘Most of all, I wish to congratulate you. You have all the virtues: memory, observation, British grit, saxophone.’

This in one hypnotic flow while Barley grinned sheepishly and allowed himself to be settled in the place of honour.

But Ned already sat stiffly, arms folded across his chest, and Clive, though he was of the circle, had managed to paint himself out of the picture. He sat among Sheriton’s young men and had pushed his chair back till they hid him.

Sheriton remained standing before Barley and was talking down at him, even when his words said he was addressing someone else. ‘Clive, would you permit me to bombard Mr. Brown with some impertinent questions? Ned, will you tell Mr. Brown, please, that he is in the United States of America and that if he doesn’t care to answer anything he needn’t, because his silence will be taken as clear evidence of his guilt?’

‘Mr. Brown can look after himself,’ Barley said – but still grinning, still not quite believing in the tension.

‘He can? That’s great, Mr. Brown! Because for the next couple of days that’s exactly what we hope you’ll do!’

Sheriton went to the sideboard and poured himself some coffee and came back with it. His voice struck the calmer note of common sense. ‘Mr. Brown, we are buying a Picasso, okay? Everybody round this room is buying the same Picasso. Blue, saignant, well-done, what the fuck? There are about three people in the world who understand it. But when you get to the bottom line there’s one question counts. Did Picasso paint it, or did J. P. Shmuck Jr. of South Bend, Indiana, or Omsk, Russia, paste it together in his potato barn? Because remember this.’ He was prodding his own soft chest and holding his coffee cup in his spare hand. ‘No resale. This is not London. This is Washington. And for Washington, intelligence has to be useful, and that means it has to be used, not contemplated in Socratic detachment.’ He lowered his voice in reverent commiseration. ‘And you’re the guy who’s selling it to us, Mr. Brown. Like it or not, you personally are the nearest we shall get to the source until the day we persuade the man you call Goethe to change his ways and work to us direct. If we ever do. Doubtful. Very, very doubtful.’

Sheriton took a turn and moved to the edge of the ring. ‘You are the linchpin, Mr. Brown. You are
the man
. You are
it
. But how much of
it
are you? A little of it? Some of it? Or all of it? Do you write the script, act, produce and direct? Or are you the bit part you say you are, the innocent bystander we all have yet to meet?’

Sheriton sighed, as if it were a little hard on a man of his tender sensitivities. ‘Mr. Brown, do you have a regular girl these days, or are you screwing the backlist?’

Ned was halfway to his feet but Barley had already answered. Yet his voice was not abrasive, even now, it was not hostile. It was as if he were unwilling to disturb the good atmosphere all of us were enjoying.

‘Well now, how about you, sunshine? Does Mrs. Haggarty oblige or are we reduced to the habits of our youth?’

Sheriton was not even interested.

‘Mr. Brown, we are buying
your
Picasso, not mine. Washington doesn’t like its assets cruising the singles bars. We have to play this very frank, very honest. No English reticence, no old-school persiflage. We’ve fallen for that horse manure before and we will never,
never
fall for it again.’

This, I thought, for Bob, whose head was once again turned downward to his hands.

‘Mr. Brown is not cruising the singles bars,’ Ned cut in hotly. ‘And it’s not his material. It’s Goethe’s. I don’t see that his private life has the least to do with it.’

Keep your thoughts to yourself, Clive had told me. His eyes repeated the message to Ned now.

‘Oh Ned, come on now, come
on
!’ Sheriton protested. ‘The way Washington is these days, you have to be married and born again before you can get on a fucking bus. What takes you to Russia every five minutes, Mr. Brown? Are you buying property there?’

Barley was grinning, but no longer so pleasantly. Sheriton was getting to him, which was exactly what Sheriton intended.

‘As a matter of fact, old boy, it’s a rôle I rather inherited. My old father always preferred the Soviet Union to the United States, and went to a lot of trouble publishing their books. He was a Fabian. A kind of New Dealer. If he’d been one of your people he’d have been blacklisted.’

‘He’d have been framed, fried and immortalised. I read his record. It’s awful. Tell us more about him, Mr. Brown. What did he bequeath to you that you inherited?’

‘What the devil’s that to anyone?’ said Ned.

He was right. The matter of Barley’s eccentric father had been aired and dismissed as irrelevant by the twelfth floor long ago. But not apparently by the Agency. Or not any more.

‘And in the ’thirties, as you no doubt also know, then,’ Barley continued in his calmer tone, ‘he started up a Russian Book Club. It didn’t last long but he had a go. And in the war when he could get the paper he’d publish pro-Soviet propaganda, most of it glorifying Stalin.’

‘And after the war what did he do then? Go help them build the Berlin Wall on weekends?’

‘He had hopes, then he packed them in,’ Barley replied after reflection. The contemplative part of him had regained the upper hand. ‘He could have forgiven the Russians most things, but not the Terror, not the camps and not the deportations. It broke his heart.’

‘Would his heart have been broken if the Sovs had used less muscular methods?’

‘I don’t expect so. I think he’d have died a happy man.’

Sheriton wiped his palms on his handkerchief and like an overweight Oliver Twist carried his coffee cup in both hands back to the refreshments table, where he unscrewed the Thermos jug and peered mournfully inside before pouring himself a fresh cup.

‘Acorns,’ he complained. ‘They gather acorns and press them and make coffee out of them. That’s what they do out here.’ There was an empty chair beside Bob. Sheriton lowered himself into it and sighed. ‘Mr. Brown, will you let me spell it out for you a little? There is no longer the space in life to take each humble member of the human family on his merits, okay? So everybody who is anybody has a record. Here’s yours. Your father was a Communist sympathiser, latterly disenchanted. In the eight years since he died you have made no fewer than six visits to the Soviet Union. You have sold the Sovs precisely four very lousy books from your own list and published precisely three of theirs. Two awful modern novels which didn’t do a damn thing, a piece of crap about acupuncture which did eighteen copies in the trade edition. You’re on the verge of bankruptcy, yet we calculate your outlay for these trips at twelve thousand pounds and your revenue at nineteen hundred. You’re divorced, freestyle and British public school. You drink like you’re watering the desert single-handed and you pick jazz friends with records that make Benedict Arnold look like Shirley Temple. Seen from Washington, you’re rampant. Seen from here, you’re very nice, but how will I explain this to the next Congressional subcommittee of Bible-belt knuckle-draggers who take it into their heads to pillory Goethe’s material because it endangers Fortress America?’

‘Why does it do that?’ said Barley.

I think we were all surprised by his calm. Sheriton certainly was. He was looking at Barley over his shoulder until then, affecting a slightly pitiful stance as he explained his dilemma. Now he straightened up, and faced Barley full on with an alert and quizzical directness.

‘Pardon me, Mr. Brown?’

‘Why does Goethe’s material scare them? If the Russians can’t shoot straight, Fortress America should be jumping for joy.’

‘Oh we are, Mr. Brown, we are. We’re ecstatic. Never mind that the entire American military might is invested in the belief that the Soviet hardware is accurate as hell. Never mind that a perception of Soviet accuracy is
all
in this game. That with accuracy, you can sneak up on your enemy while he’s out playing golf, take out his ICBMs unawares and leave him unable to respond in kind. Whereas without accuracy, you’d damn well better not try it, because that’s when your enemy turns right around and takes out your twenty favourite towns. Never mind that zillions of taxpayers’ dollars and whole junk-yards of political rhetoric have been lavished on the fond nightmare of a Soviet first strike and the American window of vulnerability. Never mind that even today the idea of Soviet supremacy is the main argument in favour of Star Wars, and the principal strategic fun-game at Washington cocktail parties.’ To my astonishment, Sheriton abruptly changed voices and broke into the accents of a Deep South hillbilly. ‘Time we blew those mothers apart before they do the same to us, Mr. Brown. This li’l ole planet just ain’t big enough for two superpowers, Mr. Brown. Which one do
you
favour, Mr. Brown, when poo-ush comes to sheu-uve?’

Then he waited, while his pouchy face resumed its contemplation of life’s many injustices.

‘And I
believe
in Goethe,’ he went on in a startled voice. ‘I am on record as buying Goethe outright from the day he stepped out of the closet. Retail. Goethe for my money is a source whose time has come. And do you know what that tells me? It tells me that I also have to believe in Mr. Brown here and that Mr. Brown needs to be very candid with me or I’m dead.’ He cupped a paw reverently over his left breast. ‘I believe in Mr. Brown, I believe in Goethe, I believe in the material. And I’m scared shitless.’